


Gentle With the Heart

by toyhto



Category: Black Sails
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-08
Updated: 2020-10-08
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:14:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26891266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toyhto/pseuds/toyhto
Summary: A lot of talk about love.
Relationships: Captain Flint | James McGraw/Thomas Hamilton
Comments: 12
Kudos: 56





	Gentle With the Heart

**Author's Note:**

> So I'm rewatching Black Sails and turns out I've written a story about Flint and Thomas getting together in the end AGAIN, which is so far the only type of a Back Sails fic that I have written. But it must be said to my defence that their canon love story is perfect so there's really no urge for me to try and fix it. What I want to write apparently is two men talking about the past and having sex once they finally get together again. So here you go. Also, this is a very sentimental story.
> 
> [tumblr](http://toyhto.tumblr.com)

”Hey,” he says as he closes the door, and James turns to him and kisses him.  
  
Something like five minutes later, he’s out of breath and can’t remember what he had been going to say. He’s holding James as close as possible, neither of them has a shirt on anymore and he doesn’t know how that happened, and his heart is beating so hard he can feel it in his throat. He wants nothing more than to peel off the rest of James’ clothes and fall with him onto the narrow bed in the corner of the room – no, he wants James right here, against this wall, because if they move, if they take a step back and think about this, maybe they will realise that there’s years’ worth of distance in between them. He wants everything at once, but what he does is that he takes a good grip on James’ shoulders and then pushes James back.  
  
“What?” James asks, glaring at him. He knows this man, a man who can’t keep what he’s feeling from showing in his eyes. _God_ , he’s missed James.  
  
“We need to talk,” he says.  
  
James shakes his head.  
  
“We need to talk,” Thomas says again, to let James know he means it. It still works. James blinks and takes a step back, and he inspects the hurt in James’ eyes. He’s pretty sure James doesn’t know Thomas can still read him, not like this.  
  
“About what?” James asks, everything in him ready for a fight. He looks different and the same.  
  
Thomas takes a deep breath and then walks to a chair and sits down. James stays where he is, standing. That’s good. That’s going to make James feel better, safer somehow. As if there’s any doubt which one of them would beat the other in a fight, if for some unfathomable reason they ended up fighting. Which isn’t going to happen. Never did. Thomas rests his hands on his knees and looks up at James. “Tell me the worst of it.”  
  
James laughs in a joyless tone.  
  
“You’re looking at me like you’re thinking that you have to hide something,” Thomas says. “Or else I’m going to walk away. I’m not going to walk away.”  
  
“You don’t know what I have to tell.”  
  
“Doesn’t matter. I’m not going to walk away.”  
  
James opens his mouth, looking at him. He tries to prepare for anything. He thinks he can see the history of violence in the way James is holding himself now, thinks he can guess some of what James has had to do to finally find him in this place, the last possible place for anyone to look. But of course he doesn’t _know._  
  
He waits, and James stares back at him, and then walks to him, takes his face in between his hands and kisses him.  
  
So, he’s kind of seeing a pattern here. He thinks about pointing that out but can’t. He’s too busy kissing James back. And James is kind of trying to climb into his lap, and he can’t have that, the chair won’t take it, and he’s too old and too sore to fall on his back on the floor with James on him, absolutely not, they can’t do stuff like that anymore. They’ll have to do that in bed. And he doesn’t know about James, obviously doesn’t know almost anything about what James has done since they last saw each other in London, and there wasn’t even a goodbye back then, and he’s spent years regretting that bitterly, as if there’ s not so much to regret, almost everything to regret, almost everything except a few things, like falling in love with this man. He doesn’t regret that. And yeah, he doesn’t know about James, but _he’s_ a bit out of practice, and they need to do this in bed, and they need to be slow and gentle, gentle with their hands, gentle with their hearts too, he thinks.  
  
“Bed,” he says, and James takes that without a complain.  
  
The bed is too narrow for two men. He supposes they’re going to find out how they’ll manage to sleep in it, because he surely isn’t going to let James out of arm’s reach if he can avoid it. Not now that he’s got James here, lying on his back in the bed, watching Thomas with a look as if he’s not sure Thomas isn’t a ghost. Thomas kisses him. They’re both ghosts. And thank god for that. Now they can finally live.  
  
But it turns out he can’t not say a few things first. James is already trying to wriggle a hand into his pants, and he circles his fingers around James’ wrist and squeezes lightly. “Whatever it is,” he says. “I don’t care.”  
  
“You’ll care,” James says with a voice full of grim certainty of how things are. He was always good at that.  
  
“Not like that,” Thomas says. “It won’t change this.”  
  
James swallows.  
  
“Won’t change how I feel about you.”  
  
“I’m not the same man anymore,” James says. He’s breathing hard and his chest is a map of new scars, a map of things that have happened to him ever since Thomas lost him.  
  
“I’m not the same man either.”  
  
“I’ve done everything you can’t even imagine. I’ve let people die because I thought something else was more important. People who trusted me. And I’ve murdered men who were my friends.”  
  
Thomas stares at him. “I’m very disappointed in you,” he says and then leans down to kiss James on the mouth.  
  
“You should be. You should be disappointed me.”  
  
“I am. Terribly.” He means it, and he knows James can tell. He can see that in the relief in James’ eyes. The reason why his voice is still light is probably the touch of James’ hand on his hipbone. “I still love you, though.”  
  
“I haven’t earned it,” James says, sounding like he’s reading a book he doesn’t understand. “I never had.”  
  
“You didn’t have to,” Thomas says and then takes a sharp breath, when James pushes his hand down to his pants. “ _God._ No one’s done that to me in…”  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
“Yeah,” he says, closing his eyes. “You’ll have to be nice about it.”  
  
“I can be nice,” James says. He sounds like he doesn’t know what he’s doing. But _oh_ , he does, he wraps his fingers around Thomas’ cock and squeezes just a little.  
  
“We aren’t finished with this conversation, though,” Thomas says, only he can’t control his voice anymore. “You’re going to tell me why you think that I shouldn’t love you and I’m going to tell you that I love you anyway and that there’s nothing you can do about it. And that you – _James_ –“  
  
“Yeah?” James says, his fingers growing bolder on Thomas. There was something else Thomas was going to say but maybe it can wait, because he can’t _think._  
  
“I want to… Can we…”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“You don’t know what I was going to –“  
  
“You can fuck me,” James says.  
  
And he does. He doesn’t know how to anymore. He has forgotten this. His fingers are clumsy and he keeps getting stuck in details that shouldn’t stop him, such as how James gets on his elbows and knees on the mattress and then glances over his shoulder at Thomas as if to check on him, or such as the faint white scar on James’ bottom, what a funny place, can’t be a funny story, or the way James flinches when Thomas puts his fingers on the said scar and then his mouth, or the rest of the noises James makes, or how tight he is, and it feels childish to think about that, ridiculous even. It’s not about that. It never was. He likes to think he would’ve loved James just as much if James had never let him close like this. But James did, and he does, and it’s as if Thomas can feel love in his fingertips, in the way the skin on their entangled legs brushes against each other, in the breaths that keep escaping him, in every noise, in every heartbeat, in every second he keeps lingering before he finally arranges them a little better and pushes inside James, in every year that he waited without knowing that he was _waiting_.  
  
“Gentle,” he says mostly to himself. It’s been too long and his heart is still sore.  
  
“Come on,” James says, the impatient bastard, and pushes back against Thomas. “I can take it.”  
  
  
**  
  
  
“Can you remember?” James asks later, when they’re lying naked and spent in the bed that really is too narrow. “How it used to be?”  
  
“No,” Thomas says.  
  
“I can’t either,” James says and then is quiet for a moment. Outside, the wind is rising. “I don’t feel like this is really happening.”  
  
“Me neither,” Thomas says. “But we have time.”  
  
“I can’t believe that,” James says. He has his arm wrapped around Thomas and he’s petting Thomas' left arm with his fingertips. “Do you realise how ironic it is? You’re the best person I’ve ever known. The wisest. The kindest. And I’m the worst.”  
  
“I don’t want to hear you say that, love,” Thomas says. “You’re talking about my beloved.”  
  
“But you will,” James says. His voice is a little distant now, as if he’s not totally here. But Thomas can let him have that. As long as he always comes back. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had time to think about what I’m doing. Or what I’ve done. A long time since I’ve had a place where I could… pause. Pause and think about those things. I think I’m going to tell you over and over again.”  
  
“I’ll listen,” Thomas says. “And I’ll love you anyway.”  
  
“I feel like… like you still loving me is the most unfair thing in the world.”  
  
“I don’t care,” he says. “Just take it.”  
  
_Just take it,_ he thinks, as the darkness in the room grows thicker and he realises James has fallen asleep in his arms. For a long time, he’s been carrying this love with him, not because he wanted to but because there was no way he could put it down. And now James is here.  
  
He kisses the top of James’ head and then closes his eyes. It’s going to rain soon. His heart is heavy and James is sleeping on his left arm that’s quickly going numb. But the love he has been dragging with him is now as light as air.


End file.
